Currently living in Paris, I'm a Labour member, activist and freelance journalist. I'll be writing mostly about missed opportunities, as I see them, and the necessity to rebuild Labour as a cohesive movement. We mustn't lose sight of reality, but we should sometimes challenge it.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Labour MPs strike back

I am always happy to say I'm wrong, so here goes. I was wrong to be so worried - enough Labour MPs had the sense to vote against holding suspected terrorists without charge for 90 days to stop it dead.

However, the press' euphoric triumphalism, excited as they are to be able to pinpoint the "beginning of the end" of the Blair era, hinders an analysis of what's really happened. We've just doubled the length of time you can hold someone on the basis of suspicion of terrorism to just under a month. There are those who welcome this move and those who say it hasn't gone far enough. But those of us who believe that an extension of detention powers without charge should always be a last resort need answers to three key questions before we finally resign ourselves to this state of affairs:

1) Did the Home Secretary look into the possibility of changing the law to allow supects to be questioned after having been charged, an established reason why we needed an extension?

2) Why don't we cut the crap and allow the use of intercept evidence in court? The Home Office continues to claim this would compromise its sources, but there are any number of solutions. We might try the in camera courts, as used in Northern Ireland with a panel of security-cleared judges. We could look at how other countries get round this problem: we know this evidence is admissible in French courts, after all.

3) What proportion of terrorist suspects could not be charged with a "lesser" offense in order to legitimise their detention and conform with due process? After all, if a suspect was in possession of a computer with encrypted data, we already have legislation to bring to task people who don't give up the key to assist police enquiries. There are any number of other possibilities.

The answers to these questions might well have yielded a more effective method of dealing with the threat that did not fly in the face of habeas corpus.

We might also ponder on the disgraceful politicisation of the police. They suggested and publicly advocated a legislative agenda and allowed themselves to be used by ministers in the brinkmanship over the last few days. A dangerous line has been crossed - but we're all too busy salivating over the prospect of Blair's departure to notice just why he should go.

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About Me

Graduated in History (Jesus College, Cambridge) 2005 and am now a freelance journalist based in Paris.
My chief concern, politically, is that the Left reassembles itself in the mainstream. That Labour has lost the support of internationalists, environmentalists, and various other organs of the Left might bring short term electoral benefits, but long term, it means a Labour government doesn't have the internal pressure to push for reform on these issues. Likewise, the glorification of the market as the solution to all ills ignores the limit of the market. No-one wants the return of the command economy, but the balance of the mixed economy is the debate we should be engaged in.
A firm believer in free speech, I support fully the attempts by organisations such as Liberty to safeguard our civil liberties and maintain our justice system as one that has the presumption of innocence at its core.